How Indian B-Schools Can Help Women and the Nation - Building Gender Balanced Business

Sujoya Basu writes in “Gender Stereotypes in Corporate India: A Glimpse” that for the country to make full use of the vast talent Indian women offer would require significant awareness, appropriate and enforceable legislation and a major change in social thinking. But that is where universities and especially business schools can come in:

• India has approximately 17 women qualified as managers for every 100 male would-be managers leaving university each year, and thus there are 2 female manager for every 100 men in business.

• In studies, Indian men hold stronger and more pervasive stereotypes that buttress male dominance in management than in most Western countries.

• Thus, professional educational institutes should require recruitment of more women as students and should help those women who take on leadership roles.

• “As women are observed more in positions where their managerial and leadership qualities become more pronounced, there is a finite chance that stereotypic inaccuracies would reduce, thus paving the way to healthier organisations and policies,” says Basu, a professor behavioural sciences at Indian Institute of Management.

The full report in The Hindu